


the most exciting thing I'd ever known

by fadeastride



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M, idiots to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:07:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26901868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeastride/pseuds/fadeastride
Summary: The first time Nolan starts to actually think about it, they're in Claude's backyard for some kind of "welcome spring" barbecue that's really an excuse to drink too much cheap beer and cook meat over a fire. Nolan's four, maybe five beers in when he tells Travis that he's got the balance of one of those goats that walk sideways up mountains and that he couldtotallywalk the fence like a balance beam."You cannot," Travis says, smashing another bite of hamburger into his mouth.
Relationships: Travis Konecny/Nolan Patrick
Comments: 14
Kudos: 272





	the most exciting thing I'd ever known

**Author's Note:**

> You ever just listen to You Told The Drunks I Knew Karate by Zoey Van Goey and think...hmmm.
> 
> I don't even go here. 
> 
> Thank you to Alex for looking this over, even though she also does not go here.

It’s not that Nolan doesn’t like Halloween, per se. He’s just not huge on the “being scared” thing. He’d prefer not to watch horror movies. He doesn’t fuck with ghosts or the paranormal or anything like that.

“You know the haunted house isn’t actually haunted, right? Like, it’s just regular people.” 

He does know that. It still doesn’t mean he wants to go in.

Travis is still standing in front of him, holding two tickets.

“You’re not down,” Travis says, matter-of-fact, like a challenge.

Fuck _that_.

He grabs his ticket out of Travis’s hand.

“Let’s go already.”

It’s horrible. So much worse than he was expecting. The strobe lights make his head hurt and it’s hard to focus his eyes on any potential movement because it looks like everything is moving. He sticks close to the wall like some kind of FBI agent on a dumb TV show, peering around corners and watching his six.

He still gets jump-scared by Freddy or Jason or whoever the fuck the guy with the old hockey mask is, anyway. He doesn’t mean to punch him. It just kind of happens.

“What the fuck!” the guy yells, pulling the mask off. “Dude, Jesus, get out. You’re not allowed to touch the actors.”

Nolan doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “I’m so sorry, holy shit, I’m so sorry.”

The guy eyes him. “For real, hurry up. There’s two rooms left. No more punching.”

Travis is howling and Nolan shoves his hands into his pockets, promises himself that they’re staying there until he gets home.

When they get out, Travis sits down on the curb and puts his head between his knees to catch his breath.

“I can’t believe you punched him. That’s the fucking funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life, swear to god.”

If the burn of his cheeks is any indication, Nolan’s red all the way down his neck right now.

“We’re never doing one of these again.”

“Bud,” Travis wheezes. “I’m pretty sure they’re gonna put your picture up in every haunted house in the state with a caption that says not to sell you tickets.”

Nolan hates him, just a little bit.

“C’mon,” Travis says, pushing himself up from the ground. “Let’s get ice cream or something, killer.”

Nolan hates him a lot.

He throws his arm around Nolan’s shoulders. “I’ll even pay.”

Nolan really doesn’t hate him at all.

\-----

They lose to the Islanders on both sides of American Thanksgiving, both times in OT, and Nolan doesn’t feel particularly thankful about it. They do manage to string together a series of wins in the beginning of December, though, which means things are a little looser in the locker room. It means Travis loses the hard set to his mouth.

It means Nolan spends a lot more time trying not to laugh at the stupid shit he says.

They still lose to fucking Columbus right before the Christmas break, and Nolan goes home and tries to not to think about how pathetic that is. It’s great to see his parents and his sisters, and that helps a lot. This house is always going to be home, he thinks, no matter how much time he spends in other places. 

Maybe it’s not even the house. Maybe it’s not the twin size bed he grew up in, the one that his feet dangle over the end of now. Maybe it’s these people who love him, these people that he loves.

He wakes up on Christmas morning to his phone buzzing with a FaceTime from Travis. It’s too fucking early to be awake, but he answers it anyway.

“Merry Christmas, Pats!” Travis crows from his living room. He’s wearing a pair of felt reindeer antlers and his hair looks like shit.

“It’s, like, not even morning yet,” Nolan grumbles, pushing his own hair out of his face.

“It’s 6:30, you absolute Grinch.”

Nolan groans. Way too fucking early.

Travis shakes a perfectly-wrapped box in view of the camera. “I had my mom wrap your present.”

“Is that why it actually looks good?”

“Fuck you. Yes.”

Something inside of Nolan feels warm in a way he can’t quite place. “Thanks, bud. Merry Christmas.”

“Get up and visit your family, you bum,” Travis says before ending the call.

He will. Eventually.

Travis’s voice echoes in his head.

He gets up.

\-----

Nolan's chatting up this leggy brunette at some 18-and-up club, letting her rest her hand against his arm while she talks. She ducks her head down and looks up at him through her lashes and he thinks he's won until Travis sloshes up to them. 

"Did you know," he slurs at Laura or Lauren or whatever her name is. "Did you know he speaks fluent French?" He pats Nolan on the shoulder and walks back to the table. 

Laura/Lauren smiles at him and leans in until her lips brush his ear. "Say something romantic."

It would be so easy to tell her that the only French he knows are swear words he learned from the French Canadians. 

Instead, he searches his brain for any other French phrase. 

"Omelette du fromage," he whispers. 

She pulls back. "Seriously? Like, are you serious right now?" She looks pissed. 

"Uh," Nolan says eloquently. 

"Whatever." She spins on her heel and disappears into the crowd. 

Nolan storms back to the table. 

"You cockblocked me!" he hisses at Travis. 

"I was trying to get you laid!"

"By telling her I speak _French_?"

Travis's face says that he's the kind of drunk where critical thinking is a little bit painful. "I thought French was sexy." His mouth falls open in realization. "But you don't speak French."

Nolan shoves him farther into the booth until he can sit down. "No, asshole, I do not."

Travis nudges a half-full beer in his direction, a pathetic attempt at an apology. 

Nolan tries to hide the black x’s on the backs of his hands and takes it.

"She wasn't that hot."

"You could do better," Travis agrees. 

He can practically hear Ghost roll his eyes from across the table. Fuck Ghost.

“Hey,” Travis says, bumping their shoulders together. “You wanna go play Call of Duty? I’ve got free beer in the fridge.”

“It’s not free if you already paid for it,” Ghost says. “Also furnishing alcohol to someone under 21 is illegal.”

Nolan glares at him until he can’t keep a straight face anymore.

“You’re paying for the Uber,” he tells Travis.

Travis finishes his beer. “I gotta pay for the drink and the ride? Jeez, you’re an expensive date.”

Nolan glares at him, too, until Travis pushes him out of the booth and through the crowd.

He should be madder at Travis, he thinks, but he’s never really been mad at Travis. 

He’s not gonna look at that too hard.

\-----

The first time Nolan starts to actually think about it, they're in Claude's backyard for some kind of "welcome spring" barbecue that's really an excuse to drink too much cheap beer and cook meat over a fire. Nolan's four, maybe five, beers in when he tells Travis that he's got the balance of one of those goats that walk sideways up mountains and that he could _totally_ walk the fence like a balance beam. 

"You cannot," Travis says, smashing another bite of hamburger into his mouth. 

"Can too," Nolan replies, absolutely sounding like a grown man and not an indignant child. 

Travis wipes a smear of ketchup from his cheek with the back of his hand. "Five bucks says you can't."

Which is how Nolan finds himself climbing the boards of Claude's fence, twisting his body to get his feet underneath him. 

He hears Claude yell from his station by the grill, "If you get hurt, I'm killing you myself."

After that, it's just one foot in front of the other, a little wobbly but steady enough to stay upright, until he reaches the end of the fence. 

He lowers himself back to the ground and holds out a waiting hand. 

"Hardcore," Travis says appreciatively, and gives him the money. 

Something in Nolan’s chest bubbles at the praise, at the way Travis is smiling at him. He’s too drunk to think about it at the time, but it comes back to him in the middle of the night.

He’s sitting on the bathroom floor, not puking but thinking he could, and his brain asks him why he lets Travis talk him or goad him or smile him into doing dumb shit.

There’s just enough alcohol left in his system to make him completely honest with himself.

The honest truth is that he’d probably do anything Travis asked him. Actually, scratch “probably.” He’d fight God if Travis smiled at him right.

The realization turns his stomach, and he shoves his head into the toilet.

_Fuck._

Admitting it makes it real, and Nolan would like nothing more than for it to not be real. He doesn’t know what to do with this new knowledge, with his apparently old feelings, with the headache building behind his eyes. 

He rests his head against the cool plastic of the toilet seat. The right answer, of course, is to do nothing. He’s not going to say anything, and it won’t fuck up his friendship, and everything will be fine. 

\-----

They push it to six games, but they still get bounced in the first round by fucking Pittsburgh. Nolan hadn’t fully assimilated to the full-blown rivalry with the Penguins, but he gets it now. Sidney Crosby may be a true Canadian hero, but that doesn’t mean Nolan doesn’t want to punch him in the face.

The day after locker cleanout, Travis shows up at his place with the dumbest proposition Nolan’s ever heard in his entire life.

"I'm sorry, what?" He’s sure he’s hearing things.

"Bro," Travis says, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Matching Gritty tattoos. To commemorate our time in Philly."

Nolan stares, waiting for him to start laughing at his own joke like he does sometimes. But, apparently, he's not joking. 

“I’m not getting a Gritty tattoo.”

Travis sticks his bottom lip out. “Why not?”

Nolan can’t believe he has to justify this. “Because...I don’t want a Gritty tattoo? I want my tattoos to be more meaningful and, like, cooler than that?”

“What’s cooler than no gods, no masters Gritty?”

This can’t be happening. “Almost everything, Teeks.”

But Travis is looking at him with these big eyes and he knows he’s gonna say yes.

“It needs to be small. I’m getting it between my toes so no one can ever see it.”

Travis whoops. “Fuck yes!”

Which is how he ends up in a chair with his leg straight out in front of him, a heavily-tatted man with a beard holding his foot still so that the heavily-tatted guy without a beard can get the gun in the right place. It hurts like hell to get inked between your toes, which Nolan knew it would. It doesn’t prepare him for how excruciating it actually is, though. He knows he wants more tattoos, but maybe not on his feet.

“Doing okay there, bud?” Travis asks from where he’s lying under another artist’s gun, shorts slung low and half a Gritty-face peering out from below his hip. Because shame is a foreign concept to Travis. Nolan has a half-hysterical thought of Travis hooking up with a girl and her having to stare at that fucking Gritty when she goes down on him.

“Fantastic,” he mutters. He’d be better if he were physically capable of telling Travis no on occasion, but whatever.

After, they go back to Travis’s and flop together on the couch. Nolan flexes his foot, staring between his toes at Gritty’s crooked eyes staring back.

Travis punches him in the arm. “Best buds, best tattoos.”

“It’s the worst.”

“You’re the worst.”

Nolan puts his sock on. He’s going to be tied to Travis forever via fucking Gritty tattoos.

“I hate you,” he says.

Travis grins. “Can’t believe you’d lie to my face like that.”

“‘s not a lie.” It absolutely is.

He’s not prepared for Travis to shove him sideways on the couch and pry his sock back off.

“Hey, cutie,” he coos at the mark between Nolan’s toes.

He’s so fucking weird. It’s disgusting that Nolan likes him so much.

Nolan kicks his foot free. “Turn the TV on. I wanna watch something besides your ugly mug.”

They end up watching a rerun of last night’s SportsCenter until Travis drifts slowly down the back of the couch and lands with his head against Nolan’s thigh.

Nolan leans his head back until he starts to doze, too.

It’s been a long season.

\-----

They get the gang back together for Claude’s bachelor party. If “the gang” is every guy Claude’s ever known in his entire life. It’s as lowkey as it was ever going to get, Nolan supposes.

Claude’s rented out a bar for the night, beer flowing and loud music under dim lights. There’s a karaoke stand in the corner and, every few minutes, another drunk asshole warbles out some shitty country song Nolan hates.

So, of course, Travis is flipping through the book of songs.

He bounds over to where Nolan is sitting on a bar stool. "They’ve got ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ and you're singing it with me."

"Counterpoint: no, I'm not."

Travis rolls his eyes. "Counter-counterpoint: yes, you fucking are." He gets both hands wrapped around Nolan's wrist and pulls until they're both stumbling toward the makeshift stage. Travis jabs the song’s number into the remote and the intro starts.

“I hate you.”

Travis waggles his eyebrows. “Just a small town girl…”

He looks so fucking stupid and Nolan doesn’t want to smile but the corners of his mouth seem to have missed the memo.

He puts the mic to his lips and sings along.

\-----

The wedding is gorgeous. Ryanne absolutely outdid herself.

He doesn’t cry during the ceremony, but Travis does. He can’t give him shit for it, though. It really is beautiful. He’s never seen Claude look so happy.

After, at the reception, they squeeze into little wooden chairs around little wooden tables and listen to people Nolan doesn’t know make speeches. The food is fancy and he can’t pronounce most of it.

When the dancing starts, Nolan keeps himself planted in his seat and watches the other guests filter out to the dance floor song after song. His eyes keep drifting back to Travis. Travis who can’t dance but loves to do it anyway. Travis who makes him feel so incredibly fond even when he looks like an idiot.

The DJ segues into that old Elvis song, that sappy one that got covered for Lilo and Stitch, and Travis’s sprints back to the table.. 

“Oh, I love this song! Come dance with me.”

The only people on the dance floor are couples and old people with their grandkids, but Travis is looking at him so fucking earnestly, so Nolan goes.

Travis loops his arms around Nolan’s neck, waits for Nolan to rest his hands on his hips before swaying them back and forth. Nolan knows there’s gonna be a picture in the group chat later.

He can hear Travis humming along, can feel the vibrations where Travis’s face is just barely touching his chest.

Nolan can’t breathe.

When the song ends, Nolan extricates himself from Travis’s arms. “I gotta get some air,” he says.

It’s not a lie.

He makes his way out behind the reception and into the trees and he can hear Travis following.

“You okay?” Travis asks, quiet.

He picks a piece of bark off a tree. "You make me...so fucking stupid. When I'm around you, it's like being told I can fly, and my body starts to throw me off the tallest building it can find before my brain has a chance to tell me all the reasons that's a bad idea."

"I don't understand." 

Nolan closes his eyes. "For some reason, I still just want you to like me."

"But I do like you, bud." Travis tugs nervously at his ear. "I like you so fucking much."

And Nolan, Nolan does the stupidest thing he's ever done: he leans down and kisses Travis. 

He's not expecting Travis to fist his hands in his shirt and push him back against a tree. 

"Fucking finally," Travis breathes, lips ghosting over Nolan's. 

Nolan gets his hand on the back of Travis's neck and puts their mouths back together. 

He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, just knows that it’s long enough for his lips to feel fuzzy.

“Should we go back?”

“I don’t want to,” Travis says, mouthing at his neck.

“Not what I asked, bud.”

Travis sighs, put upon. “Fine. I’ll go. You stay here for a minute first.”

Nolan counts to sixty in his head before making his way back into the reception.

“Okay ladies!” the DJ bellows into the mic. “It’s your time to shine. Pack that floor and catch that bouquet!”

Some wedding traditions are so stupid, Nolan thinks. He definitely doesn’t want anyone catching a bouquet at his own wedding.

Ryanne takes her place at the front of the gaggle of women clamoring for a bunch of overpriced flowers. She squeezes her eyes shut before throwing the bouquet behind her as hard as she can. 

It soars over the crowd, over the women shoving and jostling for a chance to catch it...and lands directly in Travis’s lap.

The entire reception bursts into uproarious laughter and Nolan wants to die.

Simmer claps Travis on the back. “Go get ‘em, tiger,” he says, making direct eye contact with Nolan when he says it.

Maybe he can get traded to Winnipeg. This team sucks.

The smile on Travis’s face is a touch too wide, and he hands the bouquet off to somebody’s little girl before knocking his knee into Nolan’s under the table.

It’s not long before the focus is mercifully shifted back to Claude and Ryanne, where it belongs.

“Hey,” Nolan says. “We gotta get a picture.”

He thinks it’s Claude’s aunt that he hands his phone to. It takes her three tries to figure out how to turn the flash off and actually take the picture.

It’s a good picture though.

He uploads it to Instagram, hesitating just a second before tapping out a caption.

_What a wedding date._

**Author's Note:**

> I spend a lot of time on [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/fadeastride) and [tumblr](http://holywatercheapwhiskey.tumblr.com) if you wanna say hi.


End file.
